At the cenotaph today, a couple of things struck me:
1) it's rather neat to hear the low rumble of a few hundred people mumbling The Lord's Prayer.
2) the song "God Save The Queen" fails me on both counts (or I fail it?). I don't believe in God, and I don't respect the divinity, or observance, of royalty.
3) I've further pinpointed what it is about the Remembrance Day ceremony that gets to me, emotionally. It's when the veterans, each one, comes up to the monument and salutes. I imagine them, in that salute, remembering a particular awful memory, momentarily reliving the extraordinary hell of losing a friend or comrade, or the less-extraordinary hell of wet boots in the midst of gunfire, or the hell of whatever. That moment of salute, when the old soldier is once again the soldier he once was, rips a bit of my heart out of me.
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